It has been four months since wide unrest broke out on the streets of east Leicester, and although calm has been restored on the streets, a sense of unease remains.
“I don’t think we can ever go back to normal,” said the community worker Rukhsana Hussain. “It reminds me of Covid when everyone was talking about the ‘new normal’. I think we’ve got a new normal in Leicester now, because we’ve had quite a significant change in what the community perceives safety to be.”
The images of violent clashes in the streets, cars being damaged and bottles thrown, were broadcast around the world and prompted huge speculation on social media about the causes.
The high commissions of India and Pakistan both issued statements condemning the violence, while the home secretary, Suella Braverman, visited Leicester in the aftermath promising “the full force of the law” would be used.
Earlier this month Leicestershire police announced they had made close to 100 arrests since the disorder, with some people already jailed, and they are frequently appealing to the public to help them identify possible culprits.
This month they released images of 10 men they are seeking in relation to the disorder, and said more images would be released in the coming weeks.
But while there have been no further reports of violent incidents since September, and the streets of east Leicester are back to bustling normality, many still fear the situation is fragile.
“I think it’s a sensitive time at the moment. It’s not something that now is in the past. It would be very foolish to think, ‘Oh, that was an episode and it’s all gone now,’” said Rita Patel, a Labour councillor for the Rushey Mead ward.
There is still widespread disagreement across the area’s different communities about what led to the violence.
Some suggested Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, had been imported into the community from abroad and had fuelled antagonism with the Muslim community, something many in the community strongly deny.
“Hindutva is this bogeyman. Everyone keeps floating the word and people are jumping on the bandwagon,” said Dishita, a Hindu resident in east Leicester, who chose not to give her surname. “I know victims who can’t even pronounce it. They have no idea what it is.”
“I think what was happening on the ground physically, has now moved to a social intellectual level, a narrative-building level,” Dishita added.
Others claim it was a result of escalating territorial conflict, which has reportedly led to Hindu families feeling unsafe returning to their homes in a majority Muslim area, while both sides have reported violence at the hands of the other.
It is one of the reasons why there is so much hanging on an inquiry into the violence and its causes, commissioned by Leicester’s mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby.
But a number of Hindu groups announced they would boycott the review, after it was announced it would be led by academic Dr Chris Allen from Leicester University, who had previously posted on Twitter about the unrest, ruling out Islamist extremism.
Allen subsequently stepped down from the role, but Hindu community leaders have recently written to Braverman saying they have “lost faith” in the process and urged more consideration to be taken to ensure the lead reviewer is not biased.
Patel agreed the situation wasn’t handled well. “They misjudged the situation. If you wanted to create more animosity and more antagonism, that was the way to do it,” she said, adding that in failing to hold a thorough and fair inquiry the city would be “the architects of our own undoing”.
“I don’t want the future of the city and the communities here to be dependent on whether we had an inquiry or not,” she said. “But my worry is that there will still be unfinished business, unsaid things that need to be spoken, and they will come up again, at some really unfortunate time, unless we lay things to bed properly this time around.”
There is also a feeling that Leicester has been left to deal with the problem alone, with the government reluctant to get involved.
“We’ve had the home secretary come and visit Leicester at the time, but I think since then the government has taken a step back, they’ve just washed their hands of it a little bit,” said Sharmen Rahman, councillor for the Stoneygate ward. “Certainly from the council’s perspective, there’s not been any support forthcoming.”
The review is likely to look at the role played by police both at the time of the main unrest in September, when many officers had been dispatched to London for the queen’s funeral, and in the months running up to it.
There had been allegations of assaults and attacks in the community over the summer, and people have reported that residents felt unsafe and wanted to take matters into their own hands.
Hussain said: “From the young people I’ve spoken to, lots of them actually feel very angry towards authorities, organisations, groups of people that they felt should have done something and didn’t do anything about it.
“We need to have conversations to find out what are people scared of and what they feel they’re protecting. Because if you can understand what they’re trying to protect, then you can support them with it.” Most agree that arrests and convictions won’t solve the underlying problems which led to the unrest happening in the first place.
Patel said: “We need to hold up a mirror to ourselves as people of Leicester. The challenge is not me looking at you, but me looking at myself. What role did I play in this happening?”
“You can put away the people who are carrying knives and who went out with balaclavas on, but we created the conditions where that happened.”
